The Lethality of Violence

It's never good to get shot. But timing is everything.

Something weird in the crime statistics has been tugging at me. It’s not the increase in violence itself — we get it, people are shooting at each other more — but the lethality of violence. That is, the odds that you’re going to die if you get shot.

I noticed that the ratio of aggravated assaults to homicides in Atlanta began to fall in the middle of las…